My wife and I had just moved back to the States from Ireland then. I was about to turn forty-one. Our longest try at living somewhere other than home had brought us to another dead end.

There was a gift shop inside Mount Acatenango. A real life gift shop, with fridge magnets, five-dollar sunglasses, and souvenir bobble heads. Some people might find it a little disingenuous to have one in an ancient holy site, but I didn’t.

Our mother had been to Kokomo three times in one year.

Norah waited six months for her husband to return from Vietnam. Every morning, she wondered if David was alive, or half-alive, or if he was a corpse, or the remains of a man who couldn’t be identified because David was always losing things and had most likely lost his ID tag in the depths of a jungle which, in one of her nightmares, had swallowed David whole.